The Wild East: Deconstructing the Language of Genre in the Hollywood Eastern by John C

The Wild East: Deconstructing the Language of Genre in the Hollywood Eastern by John C. Eisele This article argues for the existence of a genre of films termed the eastern that deals with the Middle East. Subgenres of the eastern (Arabian nights, sheik, foreign legion, foreign intrigue, and terrorist) vary in the degree of identification allowed the character of the Arab other, reflecting the political-historical context of their development, yet they share a number of narrative tropes that function as unifying attributes of the category as a whole. In the beginning was the sword . An executioner leads his prisoners to a square and chops off their heads with a huge scimitar, then places the heads in a basket. As he dozes off, the heads pop out of the basket and back onto their rightful owners. The reheaded prisoners escape but not before giving their executioner a taste of his own medicine by slicing him in half with his own scimitar. The short film ends as the detached torso of the executioner frantically searches for his lower half. This scene in The Terrible Turkish Executioner (Georges Méliès, 1905) provides one of the earliest narrative depictions of the Middle East on film, yet it contains a series of narrative elements that can be found in most films made subsequently in Hollywood about the Middle East and its Muslim inhabitants, be they Turks, Arabs, or Iranians: imprisonment or slavery, mutilation or the threat of amputation with scimitars, and rescue. Subsequent films in this early period1 added to the inventory of narrative devices and character types in the eastern, mainly by adopting them from earlier traditions of popular and literary Orientalism found in plays, operas, songs, novels, and the like. These elements included abduction and enslavement (of women) in a harem or imprisonment (of men) in jail; identity twists; and the depic- tion of the East as a place of both terror and redemption for sins. Hollywood’s Orient thus shared many features with the Orient of the popular imagination, but its features became reduced and refined in the crucible of repeated reworkings until any film about the Middle East shared a limited set of elements. Within the first two decades of cinema, a film tradition developed, which I will call the eastern film genre, which continues until today. But, despite this long history and “distinguished” pedigree, the eastern is strangely unnoticed in the lit- erature on film genres, although certain subtypes are recognized as distinct genres themselves (Arabian nights costumers, sheik movies, and foreign legion films). John C. Eisele is an associate professor of Arabic in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the College of William and Mary. He is completing a book-length study of Hollywood’s Middle East film tradition using notions developed in cognitive linguistics, such as prototypicality (for genre), cognitive and cultural salience, and cognitive identification. © 2002 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819 68 Cinema Journal 41, No. 4, Summer 2002 Other subgenres that I include as easterns are not recognized as discrete genres (the foreign intrigue and the terrorist types).2 Much of what has been written about easterns concentrates on those in the most recent period, in which Arab characters are reduced to raving, maniacal ter- rorists, devoid of human decency and morality.3 But, as an overview of the tradition shows, this was not always the case. In the earliest period, the Arab character at times fulfilled the role of the hero as well as the villain. A survey of the tradition also reveals a rather surprising consistency of narrative types that cuts across the boundaries of subgenres and unites almost all easterns, no matter when they were produced. This article presents a summary of the main points of similarity and difference that underlie the eastern film genre, which in turn reflect both the static as well as the dynamic and changing character of the relationship of the West to the East. Before proceeding, however, it is important to note that I conceive of this genre (and other film genres for that matter) as “prototypical” categories, as defined in the field of cognitive linguistics and summarized in the work of John Taylor.4 These categories are not defined in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions but rather in terms of a prototype, conceived of in the abstract as an entity that possesses most of the attributes that are thought of as being typical of the category as a whole. The prototype of an abstract category may then be exemplified in terms of “exemplars,” or concrete entities that are seen to possess most if not all of the typical attributes of the category. This conception of genre is closer in spirit to that of Rick Altman5 but more directly handles the question of “levels of genericity” and the variability of a film’s relationship to a genre. It is unlike Steve Neale’s conception of genre in that it recognizes as genres more than just those that are institutionalized. Neale’s notion of generic and cultural expectations (borrowed from Tzvetan Todorov) is important, however, for understanding the relationship of real events to the traditions of myth-making that are found in generic traditions.6 The Distillation of the Eastern and Its Subtypes: Saracens and Shehera- zades, Sheiks, Shackles, and Scimitars. The Orientalist tradition out of which the Hollywood eastern emerged had a long history, beginning with the stories and song tradition that grew out of the medieval Christian holy wars against the Muslim infidels, the Crusades. This tradition is represented in its most developed form in Jerusalem Delivered, a sixteenth-century work by Italian poet Torquato Tasso that, although clearly on the side of the Crusaders, depicts Chris- tian and Muslim knights as embodying both the best and the worst of the feudal traditions of chivalry.7 Thinkers and artists of the later Enlightenment tradition likewise saw in the East both positive traits (whether real or imagined), which enabled them to cri- tique the faults of European culture, as well as negative characteristics arising from the real or potential military and political threat posed by the Ottoman cam- paigns into Central Europe. The romantic tradition of Orientalism that flourished in the nineteenth century and that continues to sustain popular images of the Middle East today also contained contradictory images of the East as other: a positive or Cinema Journal 41, No. 4, Summer 2002 69 an irenic one, deriving in part from the popularity of the Arabian nights stories, which saw the East as a land of adventure, ancient knowledge, magic, and fantasy, and a negative one, which viewed the East, through the eyes of colonialism, as a land of ignorance and corruption, savagery and decadence, just waiting for the hand of Western civilization to “recivilize” it.8 Early filmmakers adopted and adapted these various modes of Orientalist rep- resentation from the prior traditions that existed in theatrical and literary sources.9 In the process, these tropes and images were simplified, both in number and kind, and cinematically streamlined, becoming in the earliest narrative films almost telegraphic symbols: deserts and sandstorms, camels and fine Arabian steeds, close-up visual contrasts between Arab and Europeans (in clothes, head covering, beards, etc.), and the vision of the Oriental city as forbidding, exotic, and danger- ous. The end results of this iconographic transfer of images forms the basis of Abdelmajid Hajji’s work, which deals with the image of the Arab in early silent films made in the United States.10 As in previous Orientalist traditions in the West, Hajji finds several contradictory representations of the Arab. He is at times sympathetic, at times inimical, and at other times a combination of both. Hajji sets up three categories of “oriental” film, as he terms them: the “realist-colonialist” type, the “psychological-Orientalist” type, and the “fantastic” type. These categories are rather vaguely defined and overlap somewhat, especially the first two, but they provide a more or less accu- rate view of the formation of the eastern genre in its earliest period. With some reworking, these three categories may be seen as the proto-forms of the basic categories of the eastern mentioned above—that is, the foreign legion subtype (the “realist-colonialist” type), the sheik subtype (the “psychological-Orientalist” type), and the Arabian nights subtype (the “fantastic” type). Hajji’s classification is based primarily on the central narrative event (military conflict versus personal conflict) and secondarily on the issue of miscegenation, or the relationship between a western, European (or American) character and an eastern, non-Euro- pean (Arab, Muslim, Turkish, etc.). The latter feature constitutes a more apt element by which to distinguish easterns, since it reflects the degree of identification with the Arab character, a criterion that is important in charting the development of the various subgenres that emerged later on.11 For example, films in the Arabian nights subtype, corresponding to Hajji’s “fantasy” type, typically do not involve any miscegenation at all. They simply involve a relationship between an eastern male (as hero) and an eastern female (as heroine, love interest, etc.). Films of the proto-sheik type (Hajji’s “psychological- orientalist” type) typically include a miscegenetic relationship between an eastern male and a western female. In some films of this type, most notably in the exem- plar of the genre, The Sheik (George Melford, 1921), the eastern male turns out to be a westerner (European or American). The third category, the proto–foreign legion type (Hajji’s “realist-colonialist” type), includes films in which there is a miscegenetic relationship between a western male and an eastern female and of- ten at the same time a western female.

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